


Less Dracula

by orphan_account



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Deaf Clint Barton, F/M, Origin Story, What Happened in Budapest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-13
Updated: 2016-12-13
Packaged: 2018-09-08 10:36:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8841292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: In which Clint makes even more questionable decisions at sixteen than even the average sixteen year-old is prone to, and ends up in an on-again-off-again professional relationship with a Cold War era science experiment named Natalia.





	

She doesn’t feel the cold. Her fingers don’t stiffen. They remain dexterous, even in the below zero temperatures that had settled over Chicago nearly a week ago. Her feet don’t ache with the cold, but it isn’t because they’ve gone numb. She is as comfortable standing in a snowbound alley as she would be in her own home. The reason why is revealed whenever she stands still. It takes a moment, but the snow and ice around her feet melts, then evaporates. Her body temperature is more than twice that of a normal human, currently. If she focuses she can control it. Usually, she doesn’t. It’s easier to allow her body to function as it likes. She is a miracle of not-so-modern science. 

There’s a boy in her alley. She supposes it might actually be his alley; she is merely squatting while she waits for the FBI to give up on apprehending a short, Eastern European or Russian-looking woman, possibly with red hair but likely disguised. After the security agents at the O’Hare International Airport quit interrogating every white woman under 5’6” who was travelling alone, she would be gone. The boy was evidently not fortunate enough to have been a Cold War science experiment, because he’s shivering and stamping his feet to keep warm despite a heavy, if patched coat. “What are you lookin’ at?” he snarls at her.

“You,” she replies, which causes him to look, if possible, even more suspicious. 

“Well,” he says. “Quit it.”

“Is this your home?” she inquires instead. 

He squints at her. “Ain’t got one of them. Who’s askin’?”

“My name is Natalia. Even if this alley is not your home, I assume it is your territory? I wish to stay here and will compensate you for your permission and discretion.”

“Honey,” he says. “This ain’t even my coat.” 

Fair enough. She shrugs. “Okay.”

“Now hang on,” he says. “What kind of compensation you talkin’?”

She is prevented from answering by the feel of a gun against the small of her back. “Hey baby, what’s a girl like you doing alone out here?”

She looks. The boy is gone, so she says “Hey, handsome. I don’t know about you, but I’m looking for a good time.”

He’s not having it. “Get on your knees, bitch.”

She’s not sure if he’s just going to shoot her, or if he’s got other plans. She doesn’t want to find out. She braces herself to drop to the ground, to knock the man’s legs out from under him. From there she will pin him to the ground and slam his head against the ground. Depending on how she is feeling she will leave him unconscious, likely to freeze to death, or she’ll kill him immediately. 

“Let her go,” the boy says.

He’s back, perched on a fire escape and pointing a bow and arrow at the man. She takes advantage of the man’s distraction to disarm him and follow through with her plans. The boy hops to the ground while she’s rifling in the man’s pockets for valuables. “Thank you,” she tells him, tossing the man’s wallet at him. 

There’s two-hundred and fifty dollars in it, enough for him to buy a coat without patches instead of stealing one off of a dead junkie, as she suspects he had. “You didn’t need help though,” he points out, going through the wallet and dropping the credit cards near the man.

“It’s nice to have,” she says, but then pauses. “Do you have a passport?” 

“What?” he asks.

“A passport. Do you have one,” she repeats.

“Not a real one,” he tells her.

She smiles. “Me neither. Want to leave the country?”

“Are you outta your mind?” he demands. “You don’t know me. I sure as hell don’t know you.”

“I need to get out of the United States for a while,” she confesses. “And—”

“And the Feds are looking for a woman like you,” he finishes.

She agrees. “I am, of course, not the woman they are looking for. However, I do not want trouble.”

“Where would we go?” he wants to know.

She shrugs. “Wherever you want. I do not care, and will pay for the tickets. Not Australia. I am wanted for questioning in the United Arab Emirates. I would prefer China, or somewhere in Africa or South America.”

“I speak Spanish,” he offers. 

***

She leaves him in Bogotá with ten grand and half the country looking for them after they kill and rob an arms dealer. He wakes up on the floor of their hotel room as she is slipping out the door. “Will I see you again?” he asks. 

She pauses. “Do you want to?”

He’s still thinking it over when the door shuts with a slight click. He thinks it might have been more romantic or dramatic or something if she wore perfume and he’d caught one last whiff of a scent that would haunt his dreams for years, but she didn’t wear any. She said it was an identifiable feature, though he didn’t see how. She said that about his tattoo, too. It was a hawk and he’d told her it was supposed to be something that could be used to identify him, that he didn’t want to end up buried in an unmarked grave or as John Doe. That’s probably why she left, leaving no trace of herself behind. 

***

He sees her again in Toronto four years later. He’s working as a bodyguard for a diplomat. She’s still killing people. She looks the same, from the glimpse he gets of her. Crimson hair and icy eyes and no perfume. He’s the only guard she leaves alive when she takes out the diplomat and he kind of wishes she had just killed him. It would be easier than the constant running he’d been doing lately. He misses being called his real name.

***

He loses most of his hearing in an explosion in Moldova or Transnistria. He’s not sure which territory he’s technically in. 1993 is all kind of a blur for him. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was a mess for everyone, including her because he’s in the hospital, staring mulishly at the nurse who is telling him he might never fully recover the use of his ears when the newspaper on his bedside table catches his eye. It’s in Romanian and all he can do with Romanian is order a beer and tell someone to drop their weapon or he’ll shoot them. There’s a picture of a woman on the front page though, and it’s just a rough drawing but the sketch artist had perfectly captured the flat expression in her upturned eyes.

***

Clint Barton, though no one has called him that in a very long time, is in Budapest in 1996. He is back to killing people because it’s hard to find work in security for a man who can only hear 27% of what other people can. He has been hired to kill whoever has been hired to kill a wealthy business man with ties to the Hungarian mob. He’s undercover as a prostitute, which means he sits in the man’s hotel room in a silk bathrobe and orders room service as many times a day as he pleases. It isn’t a bad gig until she smashes through the window, guns blazing, and puts a bullet in the man’s head and one in Clint’s shoulder. He chases her, and the mob chases him and they end up in a warehouse. 

“Natalia,” he says.

“Yes,” she replies, and then the warehouse explodes and he wakes up to her dragging him out of the wreckage and into a stolen car.

He can’t hear what she’s saying. “Do you know ASL by any chance?” he interrupts. 

She flips him off, but switches. _We are going to America._

***

She leaves him in Chicago, in the same alley where they met. His shoulder is a mess and probably infected. He’s running a fever, but her hands still feel warm when she holds his face. “You are a good man,” she tells him, and kisses him.

Then she leaves, and it takes three hours for someone to find him. He’s in the hospital, getting poked and prodded by a doctor that won’t believe him when he says the shooting wasn’t gang related. “I’ll take it from here,” a man interrupts.

He introduces himself in sign language and Clint likes that, though the part about I’m your new partner and boss is less appealing. That’s how he finds himself at SHIELD. He still kills people, but now it’s government sanctioned and pays a hell of a lot less. The man, Phil Coulson, isn’t a bad man to work with and sometimes will buy Clint a beer if a mission goes well. Clint likes that they’re called missions instead of hits. 

***

He meets a twenty-one-year-old vet student named Laura in 2002 and she’s perfect. She’s the opposite of the cold eyes he sometimes dreams about, all tan skin, dark eyes, and smiles. They adopt a three-legged dog named Lucky two years later and buy a farm together. Lucky sleeps in their bed and probably outweighs Laura. He likes pizza and having his belly rubbed. 

Laura works her way through vet school and Clint works his way through some senator’s hit list and he’s really comfortable. She wears perfume that smells like lilacs and soft flannel shirts, mostly stolen from him. They get married the summer after she graduates. “Who’s Natalia?” Laura asks when they’re looking through gifts.

Clint frowns. “An old friend. Why?”

Laura hands him a check and a note. It just says _sorry about Budapest xoxo Natalia ps congrats pps government salaries are the real war crime_ and the check is for ten grand. “What happened in Budapest?”

Clint snorts. “She shot me. Nice lady though.”

Laura doesn’t ask a lot of questions. Clint thinks it’s one of her best qualities, along with all her other qualities and also her boobs. He’s not a complicated man. 

***

Natalia shows up half dead at the farm in 2007 while Clint is in Lebanon. Laura is expecting their first child and tells Clint later that she had seemed nice enough. “She said she hoped the baby looked like me and not you, for its sake, and then she took half a bottle of horse tranquilizers and let me dig bullets out of her stomach. Like you said. Nice lady.”

Clint sighs. He sighs again when he discovers a bank account set up as a college fund for the baby, a boy they name Nathan, ostensibly after Laura’s father, but also kind of after Natalia, who sends birthday cards and money. 

Nathan looked like Clint.

***

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Clint says, and lowers his bow.

The infamous Black Widow, the Slavic Shadow, the Red Death, the Enemy of the West, the worst thing to happen to American intelligence agencies since Benedict Arnold, was standing in front of him. Her hair was a familiar crimson. Her eyes were very pale blue and almost confused beneath the cold. “Hello,” she signs. “You are with SHIELD?”

“I thought you knew. I thought you set that up,” he tells her, thinking back to her comment on government pay. 

She shakes her head. “You were supposed to be hired at the American tax place. The IRS. I suppose SHIELD saw your file and did some research. You’re not the kind of man they would pass up.”

“What kind of man is that?” he wants to know.

“A good one,” she decides, and lowers her gun. 

“I’m not going to kill you,” he assures her.

She shrugs. “You can’t. Many men have tried.”

It’s 2010, but she looks the same as she did when they met in 1987. “Are you a vampire?” he asks, because that would be kind of cool and he might not be sixteen anymore physically, but his aching joints be damned he was allowed to ask dumb questions. 

“A science experiment. More Frankenstein’s monster than Dracula,” she replies.

“Huh,” he says. “Wanna work for SHIELD? I bet they’d take you. I’ll help you escape if they try to lock you up.”

She considers it. “How is the pay?”

“Shit,” he replies cheerfully. “But Laura and I have a spare bedroom and could use an in-house baby-sitter.”

“Or perhaps a condom,” she suggests. “Or a vasectomy.”

Clint shrugs. “I like kids. Laura likes kids. And anyway, we’ve only got the two right now.”

Natalia appears skeptical, but follows him to where Coulson is panicking in a surveillance van. Clint is never going to hear the end of this one.


End file.
